Memorabilia Antonina

This is my blog for posting material of academic interest (to me). Expect to see stuff about Greek and Roman history, archaeology, Classical literature, the Ancient Near East, historical films, teaching, the reception of the Classics in science fiction, the abuse of history, science fiction criticism, and occasionally other historical stuff.

Monday, February 02, 2015

The Ninth Science Fiction Foundation Masterclass in Science Fiction Criticism will be held from Friday 17 July to Sunday 19 July 2015.

The SFFMasterclass involves three days studying texts supplied by three class leaders. It is a great way to broaden your critical perspectives, sharpen some critical tools, and to make contacts with other people writing on SF and Fantasy. The class leaders are drawn from professional writers, academics and fans, and this is a great opportunity to learn from people experienced in their craft.

Anyone interested in writing seriously about science fiction and/or fantasy, at whatever level they are in their careers, is welcome to attend. This includes not just critics and reviewers, but historians and other scholars. Those who have attended past Masterclasses are also welcome to apply (though we will prioritise applications from those who have not been previous students).

Past students have found these events immensely beneficial, and often return. For some reports and endorsements from past students and class leaders, see the Facebook page for the Masterclass;

We are pleased to announce that the venue will again be the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, founded by Charles II in 1675, and the home of the Prime Meridian.

Price: £200; £150 for registered postgraduate students.

The Class Leaders for 2015 will be:

Pat Cadigan, multiple Clarke and Hugo Award-winning author of Synners and Fools, and Official Queen of Cyberpunk.

To apply please send a short (no more than 3,000 words) piece of critical writing (a blog entry, review, essay, or other piece), and a one page curriculum vitae, to masterclass@sf-foundation.org. Applications received by 28 February 2015 will be considered by an Applications Committee consisting of Tony Keen, Andy Sawyer and Kari Sperring. Applications received after 28 February may be considered if places are still available, on a strictly first-come first served basis.

Wednesday, December 17, 2014

One of the things I've often heard said is that most texts of ancient mythology are pretty much fan fiction, since they reuse and repurpose characters that already exist. "Virgil was writing Homer fanfic" is the way it's often phrased. I'm not too sure that the equivalence is as strong as it's sometimes claimed to be. For a start, the concept of fan fiction is predicated on the idea that there are 'official' and 'unofficial' stories set in a particular megatext, and that the official stories hold an essential position of privilege over the unofficial ones. That's not really true in ancient literature - not even Homer is quite treated in that fashion. Still, what the comparison does show is that fanfiction, telling new stories about characters in stories that we've heard, is a manifestation of an urge in human storytelling that has very deep roots indeed, and that making the creation of original characters a sign of a superior writer, a stick that is often used to beat fanficcers, is a fairly recent idea.

Monday, October 13, 2014

I've had my attention drawn to an online piece by W. Robert Connor, arguing that the name of the author of the second Gospel, "Mark", or "Marcus" in Latin, suggests that he was from a pro-Roman and pro-Herodian family. The name, Connor suggests, may be a nod towards the Roman general Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa, who spent two periods in the East in charge of, among other areas, Judaea - as an example of pro-Roman naming he mentions the Tetrarch known to us as Herod Agrippa, but who was born Marcus Julius Agrippa. The author of the Gospel, the argument goes, may have been named at a time when the name "Marcus" was in vogue, which Connor suggests may have been the late teens BCE, making the Evangelist born rather earlier than he is generally thought to have been.

My immediate thought was this: Surely the use of Marcus shows that Mark was a Roman citizen?

To elaborate: "Marcus" is a praenomen, the first part of the tria nomina, the three-part Roman citizen name. In the first century CE praenomina were, as far as I know, the exclusive preserve of Roman citizens - hence the inscriptional formula [praenomen] + filius (e.g. M(arci) f(ilius)) could be used to demonstrate that one's father was a Roman citizen, and therefore one must oneself be a freeborn Roman citizen. If praenomina were in more general use, this formula could not carry the intended message. Connor (who seems throughout unfamiliar with Roman naming conventions) implies that any Jewish family could choose to name their child Marcus; I think that's only the case if the family were already Roman citizens.

Why Marcus? Let's first get rid of the red herring of Marcus Julius Agrippa. The Agrippa part of this name (the cognomen)* is certainly in honour of Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa. But the standard practice (which doesn't mean it was universal - naming practices regularly broke any "rules" that may have existed) was for first-born sons of Roman citizens, such as Herod Agrippa, to inherit their praenomen and nomen from their father. So Agrippa's father, who we know as Aristobulus, was probably Marcus Julius Aristobulus (we don't actually have Aristobulus' full citizen name recorded, but he must have had one). The Julius comes from when Herod Agrippa's great-grandfather Antipater was made a Roman citizen by Julius Caesar. Standard practice was to take the praenomen and nomen of the person who raised one to Roman citizenship, and use one's own name as one's cognomen. So Antipater would have become Gaius Julius Antipater.

Why the change to Marcus? I think this is because Aristobulus was the third son, rather than the first, of his father Herod the Great. Now, usual practice amongst Greeks who had achieved Roman citizenship was to distinguish between brothers through the use of a different cognomen, whilst retaining praenomen and nomen. In Italy, however, brothers were distinguished by different praenomina, whilst the nomen and cognomen remained unchanged; so the brother of Marcus Tullius Cicero was Quintus Tullius Cicero, I wonder if Herod was using both systems; so instead of distinguishing between Gaius Julius Antipater and Gaius Julius Aristobulus, he distinguished them as Gaius Julius Antipater and Marcus Julius Aristobulus. If that's correct, then given that Aristobulus was born in 31 BCE, if a Roman Marcus was being honoured here, it was not Agrippa, who would not come out to the east until eight years later, but the ruler of the Roman East at the time (and Herod's close ally), Mark Antony.

So why Marcus for the Evangelist? One might speculate (and this is very much speculation) that if his family received Roman citizenship from Agrippa when he was in charge in the east, they may have taken the names "Marcus Vipsanius" as the family praenomen and nomen. But one might alternatively have expected them to have taken the names of the emperor at the time, Gaius Julius (Caesar Augustus); certainly this was later practice, ensuring that such honours were monopolized by the imperial family. And even if "Marcus" does come from Agrippa, this merely indicates when Mark's family were enfranchised - it says nothing about when Mark himself was born.

In the end, I don't think we can say with any certainty why Mark was called "Mark" rather than any other name. But this does not mean that Connor's broader point about the pro-Roman nature of Mark is invalid. Indeed, given that I think it can be 100% asserted that Mark was a Roman citizen (which leads me to wonder why it never is), his pro-Roman stance is implicit and to be expected. I also think Connor is right about where Mark grew up, in the heavily Hellenized city of Caesarea, which would have had a strong community of Roman citizens, rather than the more traditional Jewish environment of Jerusalem.

I now invite comments from better Romanists than me.

[Edit: Emma England rightly points out that the above is based on the a priori assumption that "Mark" was the Evangelist's birth-name. I don't think that's an unreasonable assumption, but it is an assumption, and I should have flagged it as such.]

*Actually I suspect "Agrippa" is an agnomen, an additional name, and the cognomen here was the family name Herodes, so he was Marcus Julius Herodes Agrippa.

Wednesday, October 08, 2014

This is one of those long essays I
probably shouldn’t write here. You might want to read this in conjunction with my piece on Reception theory.

I began this piece in response to a
conference in Bristol in 2010, organized by the ever-interesting Ika Willis, “Desiring
the Text, Touching the Past: Towards An Erotics of Reception” (I fear the
official conference webpage has long since disappeared into the black hole of
institutional reorganization of webspaces). The thinking behind the conference was
inspired by Roland Barthes’ The Pleasure
of the Text (1975), and focussed upon responses to texts that were more
personal than the usual “distanced” academic approach (you can read some of
Ika’s thinking on this topic here).
It kicked off a number of thoughts in my head about the overlap between
fannishness and academic study, and I wrote some preliminary notes for this
piece at the time (initially intending it for the Friends of the Text blog that
started up in the wake of the conference, but has since sadly disappeared). It
never got very far, as other matters intervened, but I always meant to get back
to it. I am doing so now because of a couple of interrelated developments in
the teaching I am doing in the current academic year.

First up, I got offered the opportunity
to teach some sessions on the University of Roehampton’s “Theories and Methods
in Classical Research”, part of their MRes
in Classical Research. When I was offered this, I had just been listening
to Neil
Easterbrook lead a class at the Science Fiction Foundation’s Masterclass in Science Fiction
Criticism on the writing of scholarly articles and criticism. That inspired
me to want to spend one of my MRes sessions talking about academic writing to
the students. Something that never really got said to me when I was starting
out as an academic was that I was now an aspiring writer, and I suspect still
that most postgraduates think of themselves as researchers and scholars rather
than writers. But research in the humanities must (in the majority of cases) eventually result in a
published outcome. The various research assessment processes which have dogged
the UK university system since the 1980s judge university departments on the
publications of their members, which means, in effect, that scholars are judged
on their writing, and that those wishing to make their way in an academic
career will find that their chances of appointment and advancement are based
upon what they have written.

The second thing was that I
successfully applied to teach on the Open University’s new MA in Classical Studies.
Reading through the first Block, I discovered there a Unit on “Finding a Voice”,
exactly the sort of discussion I was planning for the Roehampton students. So I
thought it was time I finished this piece off, to use it as a teaching object.

At the end of 2010, John Sutherland,
Emeritus Professor of English Literature at University College London, appeared,
as he often does, on BBC Radio 4’s nightly arts review programme, Front Row. He came on
to promote his then-new book 50
Literature Ideas You Really Need To Know. That book is not of
particular concern here, but something he said at the end his item struck me. He
said that he now knew so much about how fiction worked, and how it was
constructed, that he was no longer able to enjoy it in the way he once had. He
wished he could recapture the innocent enthusiasm he once had for H. Rider
Haggard, but this was now impossible.

And I thought, “Professor Sutherland,
you are doing it wrong.”

This is hardly the first time John
Sutherland has been wrong. Anyone from a background in science fiction fandom
and criticism who has followed his pronouncements over the years on genre
fiction, and why it should not be recognised by the likes of the Man Booker
Prize, will be familiar with his wrongness. (And I wonder if his inability to
enjoy Rider Haggard any more has anything to do with his hostility towards
genre.) But his error here cuts right to the heart of what I believe to be the largely
artificial and often wholly unnecessary and counterproductive divide between
fandom and the academy.

First of all, let’s define our
terms. In a number of academic contexts, when people talk about fannish
writing, they mean fanfiction writing, and by “fandom” they mean the communities
of fanfic writers who come together – so usually people will refer to “fandoms”
and mean the communities that have gathered around fanfics about a particular
film, novel or television series. Of course, not for a moment would I say that
this is not fannish writing – indeed, a lot of my own fannish activity involves
being part of those communities, if not actually writing fanfic myself (any
more). But this is not the only form of fannish writing. [Edit: And see also Kate Keen's very valid point in the comment below that these writers write more than just fanfic.] There are a lot of
different fandoms out there, and in many of them, the predominant writing mode
is non-fiction rather than fiction. This is true, for instance, of the science
fiction fanzines that were my main outlet for writing in the period 2000-2002,
which were (and remain) full of critical analyses of texts. Other fandoms, such
as Doctor Who, have devoted as much
attention to analysing official stories as to creating new ones. So when I
discuss fannish writing here, what I primarily mean is that critical analysis.

Fandom often sets itself up in
opposition to academia. Academics are viewed as outsiders, and academic writing
and teaching is seen as sucking all the enjoyment out of reading texts, exactly
as Sutherland feels it does. On the academic side, there are some who are
dismissive of the obsessiveness of fans; but as others have observed, it is a
bit rich for anyone who conducts detailed academic research to use “obsessive”
in a pejorative fashion.

This opposition between fandom and
academia is, in my view, largely false. For a start, there are many academics
(e.g. myself, Farah
Mendlesohn, Juliette
Harrisson, etc.) who self-identify as fans, and attend fannish events such
as Eastercons or
what was once the SFX Weekender.
“They” are “us” in this case. And fans, as Stacie L. Haynes (another person
both fan and academic) has pointed out, are entirely capable of engaging in
exactly the sort of detailed and lengthy analysis of texts that academics do,
in a manner that is often indistinguishable beyond the apparatus of academic
criticism (footnotes, bibliographies, etc.). By doing so, not only do these
fans demonstrate the falsity of the divide between academia and fandom, but
they also demonstrate the falsity of Sutherland’s assertion that detailed study
of the mechanics of texts robs you of the ability to enjoy them. Rather, if
approached properly, this study (and being taught about texts) should enhance your
enjoyment.

Unfortunately, study of texts is associated in many people’s minds
with school experience, and being made for class to read literary works that you
don’t want to. This, I would say, is nothing to do with the quality of teaching
(or of the texts – I appreciate that the antipathy I picked up towards Dickens from
school is probably largely unfair), it’s just the child’s natural resistance to
being forced to do anything; but it does lead to an attitude that is hard to
shift, that analysis of a text and love of that text are antithetical (and that
brings us back to the theme of the Bristol conference).

Much is lost through this division.
There’s a really good discussion of the things that academics and fans can
bring to each other in the “Introduction” to Matt Hills’ Triumph
of a Time Lord. I recommend everyone reads this. However, there is also
some recent pushing back from the academic side against the concept of the
“acafan” – I particularly remember the closing session of the 2011 conference “Alien
Nation: A Conference on British Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Television”
at Northumbria University, where Ian Hunter argued for a move away from the
acafan and paying attention to fandom, which prompted James Chapman to say that
he didn’t see himself as a fan of the texts that he wrote about. Now, since I
believe fervently (in contrast to the self-appointed gatekeepers of some
fandoms) that “fan” is a term of self-definition, and not a label that anyone
else can grant or withhold, I cannot object to Chapman’s choice not to define
himself in that way (Hunter and Chapman are, incidentally, both scholars that I
respect). And I can also see that scholars working with fan readings of texts
run the risk of assuming (almost always incorrectly) that fan readings
necessarily represent the responses of the wider audience (the problem is, of
course, that while I understand what Hunter is trying to move towards, the casual consumer of a text – what Hunter calls the “indifferent
audience” – tends not to record their reaction to a text in any form that is
easily accessible to scholars).

But I do feel that scholars are in
some manner fans, or enthusiasts, of the texts that they study, or even that
they love them. I mean, if you have devoted your life to the study of the Aeneid, there must be something about
that text that attracts you. I can imagine that people might write commentaries
on texts in which they are not really interested, but I can’t imagine they
would be particularly good, and I suspect almost always there is something in a project that engages the scholar's interests and enthusiasm. And where there is enthusiasm, I feel that there is
a lot of value in scholars admitting this. It destroys the myth of academic
objectivity, and allows you to situate yourself in relation to the text, thus
ensuring that your audience knows exactly where you stand.

So, for instance,
when I teach cinema history, I feel there is value in letting the students know
that, whilst I admire Citizen Kane
(1940) for its cinematic techniques, I’m never going to love it the way I love Casablanca (1942), or that while I can
see there are interesting things to say about James Cameron’s Titanic (1997), particularly in relation
to the way it uses the tropes of 1940s melodrama, the way it is coded as a
science fiction movie without actually being a science fiction movie, and its
status as a cultural and economic phenomenon, I have to grit my teeth every
time I’m required to watch it.

I think an awareness of the scope of
your emotional engagement with a text may perhaps help avoid some potentially
spurious avenues of research. I’ll begin with a possibly unfair example. Some
recent work on the Aeneid has
postulated that, far from being the unqualified work of propaganda for the regime
of the emperor Augustus that everyone used to believe it is, The Aeneid actually includes some subtle
criticism of Augustus. I’m not sure I buy this; if the criticism is
sufficiently unsubtle to be picked up by modern scholarship, there’s a good
chance it might be something that Augustus himself could spot, which might have
landed Virgil in the sort of situation vis-à-vis
the emperor that Ovid later faced.

Now, as I say, I may be out of order
in postulating this (and perhaps just treat this as a thought experiment), but I find myself wondering if what is going on here is a
clash between a love of Virgil’s craft and a dislike of the imperial system he
endorses. This wasn’t an issue, at least in terms of what filtered through to
students, when I was being first educated. Everyone admired Virgil, and everyone
admired Augustus for bringing the Roman world out of chaos and into order
(these were the days when the Roman principate was described as a sort of
“constitutional monarchy”). In our post-colonial age, people are rather more
wary about praising imperialists, and can see that, while it certainly can be
argued that some aspects of the Augustan settlement benefited some people (the
transformation of provincial government from a licence to steal to something
that actually had to be done properly must have had an impact, at least on
provincial élites), the emperor’s position was extra-constitutional, being a
military dictatorship covered by a veneer of legality, and that intellectual
freedom was not what it had been under the Republic (Catullus could never have
been tolerated under Augustus as he was under Caesar).

But we still admire the
poetry of Virgil. So are attempts to argue that Virgil is actually criticizing
Augustus manifestations of a desire to continue admiring Virgil whilst removing
uncomfortable elements of his political allegiance? As I say, I’m no Virgil
scholar, and I’m surely oversimplifying, so I could be wrong here, though this review does make
similar points about the so-called “pessimistic” reading of Virgil. If I’m
right, I don’t think this is the way to go; better to acknowledge both the
greatness of Virgil’s art, and the problems of the propaganda in the poem. I
recommend “How
to be a fan of problematic things” as a guide to how to handle this sort of
issue. But as I say (and yes, this is getting boring), I could be wrong, and
constructing a pure straw man in this part of my argument.

In any case, the point that is
actually important here is that a more openly fannish attitude towards the text
being discussed might at least enable readers to make a more accurate judgement
about whether affection for Virgil is distorting anyone’s arguments, and
perhaps even help authors take into account their own biases.

So let’s move onto something a bit
more solid. For a really egregious example of how wrong scholarship can get
when it is divorced from an emotional response to the text, I offer the late Guy
Lee’s commentary on Catullus, Poem 85. Lee was an eminent Latinist, and
his Oxford World’s Classics
translation is well-respected, and appears on a lot of reading lists. I haven’t
read enough of the work to form an overall judgement of it, but I think he goes badly astray with
his commentary on this poem, one of Catullus’ most famous:

Odi et amo. quare id faciam, fortasse
requiris.

nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior.

I hate and I love.
Why do I do that, you might ask?

I do not know, but
I sense it happening, and I am torn apart.

Here is what Lee has to say about it
in his notes:

This famous epigram
disproves the theory that every good poem provides all the information needed
to understand it. Presented with it out of context one could not possibly know
that Catullus was talking about hating and loving the same woman at the same time.
In other words we need to have read LXXII, LXXV and LXXVI in order to
understand it.

I have used this poem and Lee’s
comment when I was teaching Intermediate Latin, and the students I taught had
much the same reaction as me to what Lee says here – that it’s an astonishing
misreading of the poem, and in fact, palpable nonsense. The poem does contain everything necessary for
its understanding, and that Catullus is hating and loving the same woman ought
to be apparent from the second line; indeed, to admit the possibility that the
this is not the case is to render that line ridiculous. There is no emotional
conflict inherent in loving one person and hating another, and it can hardly be
described as “excruciating”.

No-one needs to have read another
word of Catullus, or even to know anything more about him, to see that the
object of odi and that of amo must be the same. You need only to
have been in love with someone and feel that said person has unforgivably
betrayed or hurt you, and be in that cleft stick of hating them for what they
have done to you but still unable to shake the love you had for them in the
first place – or to be aware that these sorts of things can happen. It is the
same emotion expressed, if less elliptically, in Smokey Robinson’s “You Really
Got A Hold Of Me”: “I don’t like you, but I love you.” It is precisely because
of the universality of its sentiment that the poem is so famous (it is in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations).Through his commentary, Lee
inadvertently casts himself in the role of Catullus’ clueless addressee, who
can’t quite understand what the fuss is all about. (It is true that Catullus also deals with conflicted feelings, specifically towards Lesbia, in poems 72, 75 and 77, but that does not mean knowledge of those poems is needed to understand the emotional impact of 85.)

I have a sneaking suspicion (and
this may get me into trouble) that part of the problem that results in comments
like Lee’s is the emphasis placed upon philology in the discipline of Classical
Studies (Lee’s introduction to his translation of Catullus is quite
philological in its approach). Philology is the intensive study of the language
and its constructions, though close detailed analysis of the texts. Philology
is, of course, vital to a subject based upon texts in foreign and ancient
languages. The only reason we can say anything at all about Catullus is that
philologists have worked on the manuscripts, and given us confidence in the
published texts from which we work. Everybody working in Classical Studies, in
my opinion, needs to know a bit of philology.

The problem comes when some seem to
suggest that philology is all that is needed, that once the intricacies of
Greek and Latin grammar are mastered, any other skills (e.g. literary or
historical analysis) are easily picked up without really trying. This, I fear,
can lead to poor scholarship. Philology is very useful for drawing out what a
text says, but it is rather less
useful when it comes to what that text means
(I well remember a conversation with Professor Emeritus Christopher Rowe where he
expressed the view that it may be true that undergraduates are overall less
able to read Latin and Greek than they were, but that critics, in focussing on
that, are overlooking that these self-same undergraduates are far better
equipped than their predecessors to talk about Greek and Latin works as
literature). My suspicion is that an over-emphasis on philological training at
the expense of anything else leads to commentary on love poetry that seems
disconnected from the emotions that said poetry deals with; or people writing
on Aristophanes who can tease out the complications of his syntax, but seem
unable to spot where he is making a joke (and to judging the reliability of
historians at least partially on the attractiveness of their literary style, and
whether they tell us that they are intrinsically trustworthy – but that’s
probably a rant for some other time).

I don’t mean, of course, to condemn
anyone with a philological training – the majority of philologists are really
good, and are aware that there is more to talking about a text than simply the
philological approach. Indeed, there’s a lot of that sort of training in my
background, though tempered by a Ph.D. completed in a History department, for
which I will always be grateful.

What I am saying is that we, as a
discipline, need to be aware of a wide range of issues when writing about
texts, possibly a wider range than we sometimes consider, and that a “fannish”
approach (or however you wish to describe it) can be an advantage here.

Writing with a fannish perspective
almost inevitably involves writing from a personal point of view. Classics/Classical
Studies academia has been here before. Twenty years ago “personal voice
criticism” burst into the field, with sessions at the American Philological
Association in 1994 and the Classical Association in St Andrews in 1995 (where
the late David West criticised the approach in his Presidential Address as part
of a general call for the rejection of “theory”). I didn’t attend the Scottish
session, but I was at the conference, and I do recall there being a buzz about
the papers around it (much of it, I recall, antipathetic responses to Judy
Hallett’s paper about American universities’ preference for employing British
scholars over Americans, a thesis which she perhaps overstated, but which probably
carries more weight than it was allowed). This culminated in the publication of
Compromising
Traditions: The Personal Voice in Classical Scholarship, edited by
Hallett and Thomas van Northwick (1997). And there overt theoretical
exploration of the personal voice seems to have stopped, bar a couple of
reviews, e.g. one by Gideon
Nisbet in Bryn Mawr Classical Review
(on
his own admission written by “a younger and angrier Nisbet”), and an even
more hostile one in Classical Journal. Clearly
the issue occasionally resurfaces, at least as a practical consideration, as
indicated in a report
of a Twitter debate that Liz Gloyn was part of back in 2012. [Edit 20/10/14: I checked with Liz, and this debate seems to have been a general academic one, rather than one confined to Classical Studies. I have no idea of the state of play of the debate on the personal voice outside of Classical Studies.] There are
clearly some scholars who have subsumed the personal voice in practice, very
often, as both Liz and I
have noted, in Reception Studies, where perhaps the nature of the material
makes a less formal approach more comfortable.

But it is a shame that theoretical
debate has not really continued – as Gideon says in a comment on Liz’s post,
this is a conversation we should have continued having in the discipline (though,
as I note at the beginning of this piece, it is interesting that the OU’s new
MA course chooses to engage directly with the personal voice). Perhaps now is
the time for it to come back. For me, the intrinsic advantages of the personal
voice still apply. With impersonal usage, it is too easy for statements to
appear as objective facts, when they are actually statements of opinion. I am not
arguing that there is no such thing as an objective fact – it is, for instance,
simply the case that the Cato who appears on stage in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar is Portia’s brother and
not, as Wikipedia had it until I found this and corrected it, her father. But
that is a completely different statement from “Wordsworth is a better poet than
Bob Dylan”, which, however much I may agree with it, remains a subjective statement
of opinion. At its most egregious (yes, this is my current favourite word), an
over-reliance upon the impersonal can result in students writing “It is
suggested that…”, implying the existence of some third party consulted, when
what they actually mean is “I wish to suggest that…” But more subtly, and
perhaps more dangerously, I have seen articles in which subjective opinions are
then employed as if they are objective facts – canon creation is full of this
(see the Wordsworth/Dylan comment above, which is something I genuinely heard
on Radio 4 – it’s entirely possible that it was John Sutherland again). And I
repeat, expressing enthusiasm for your subject matter is no bad thing. I am
just about to finish a long-delayed review of Classics
and Comics, and one of the points I will make there is that a weakness
of the volume (one that I am sure the editors wished to avoid) is that few of
the pieces capture the enthusiasm for the subject matter that informs the best
writing in comics fandom.

My own feeling about Compromising Traditions is that it often
falls short of its hoped-for target because, whilst all the contributors are
theoretically interested in the personal voice, not all of them actually have
practical experience of its application. This results in writers unsure of
their tone, and often in danger of crossing the line between writing with a
personal perspective and over-sharing (I personally feel that on at least one
occasion that line is crossed). I don’t myself think that the personal voice
requires the dumping of large elements of autobiography into your writing – it
requires merely writing from your own perspective (rather than from some
omniscient “objective” view). You can liven your writing up with anecdotes
without necessarily revealing your every emotion.

The solution to the problem of lack
of practice in the personal voice is, of course, to practise the personal
voice. And that requires finding a venue where the personal voice is more
accepted, and honing your writing skills there, before bringing them to bear on
more academic material. For me, this was the two years I’ve already mentioned
where I spent writing almost exclusively for fanzines, which made me a
massively better writer – for others, it is active writing on social media, in
particular on blogs (Facebook, Tumblr and Twitter don’t really encourage
writing sufficient length here). Blogging still sometimes seems something that lies
outside academic activity. The pressures on full-time academics very much push
them towards spending all their writing time directly focussed upon their
research. Yet blogging can be very useful in raising one’s profile. This is
certainly true for Mary Beard – her position as “Britain’s best-known
classicist” is, I would argue, very substantially connected with her blog A
Don’s Life and the increased media presence that has resulted. Beard is
a special case – her blog is a piece of paid journalism. But other early career
academics have certainly raised their profiles through blogging, at least
within the discipline – I think of Juliette Harrisson and Liz Gloyn – and Helen King notes
that she finds blogging useful to keep in the discipline of writing. As more
younger (and indeed older) scholars blog as well as write in more academic
arenas, I feel sure that a more personal approach will inform more academic
writing (though at the same time, the opportunities blogging provides for
getting noticed will decline). That doesn’t necessarily mean more use of overt
autobiography, something that often gets included in the personal voice approach,
but which, as I say, I don’t think is necessarily intrinsic to it, but more of a sense of
the personality of the writer coming over in what they write.

What will that look like? Well, I
think there’s a good example in Gideon Nisbet’s Ancient
Greece in Film and Popular Culture from 2006. This is a book very much
written in an individualist style – I have indeed told Gideon that I hate him, for
writing exactly the sort of idiosyncratic, erudite and funny book that I wish I
had written myself (it’s okay, we’ve been friends since the early 1990s, we’ll
get by this…). The jokes, to me, function as memorable cores around which the
points that Gideon is actually trying to make can coalesce. There’s a great gag
about Antony in Cleopatra (1963) crying
in front of the tomb of Alexander, whom Richard Burton had played seven year
earlier – “a famous drunk (played by a famous drunk) weeping for another famous
drunk (ditto)”.

There are risks here. I’m sure that
there are some who think Nisbet’s style to be wholly inappropriate (though the
reviews I’ve seen have been favourable; however, he did receive some criticism
for his previous book, Greek Epigram in the
Roman Empire, written in a similar style). And I myself have been told
off for being too chatty. Despite what Helen Sword says,
it is not entirely mythical to suggest that early career researchers may need
to be concerned about this issue. As Susanna Morton Braund notes in her
contribution to Compromising Traditions,
the Latinist with the most individual voice in the 1990s, John Henderson, wrote
from a safe position as a Lecturer (and later Reader and Professor) at King’s
College Cambridge. (Interestingly, I’ve found quite hard, without doing more
diligent research than perhaps this piece really warrants, to find much that
Henderson wrote prior to 1987 – I’ve only turned up one article in Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological
Society that I’m not able to access online, so I can’t say whether
Henderson always wrote in an idiosyncratic style. Anyone who would like to enlighten me about this, please do so.) On the other side of the
coin, my own prospects for career advancement in academia are non-existent, so
it doesn’t matter what and how I write, something which, as I note in my
chapter in The Para-Academic Handbook,
is actually quite liberating. But I appreciate that there are many people who
fall between these two points, and their concerns about how they write and the
effect it might have on their careers are not entirely illusory.

Nevertheless, I encourage you to at
least think about writing in a more personal, and more fannish style. I am not
remotely saying that you should write like Gideon Nisbet, or John Henderson, or
Roz Kaveney (another scholarly writer, though one outside the academy, whose
style I admire for its personality) – indeed, the whole point of the personal style
is that it is unique to the individual using it. But given the choice, I would
rather write like any of these than like the dry, dull author of Dynastic
Lycia.

I think it would be good for
scholars at all stages of their career to meditate on what a more fannish
perspective and a more personal voice could do for them. The advantages –
communicating more clearly, communicating your enthusiasm for the subject,
writing more honestly, and not sucking the joy out of your topic, either for
yourself or for your readers – seem to me well worth considering.

Tuesday, September 23, 2014

Today is Bi Visibility Day. Bisexuality, as I've said before, has become in some people's eyes a sort of Schroedinger's Cat of sexuality - bisexuals exist in a state of indeterminacy, either gay or straight, which will be fixed when the "box is opened", the box-opening moment being the person getting involved with a person of the same or the opposite sex, thus becoming gay or straight.

This, of course is bollocks, but the inability of people, both gay and straight, to see beyond a binary division of sexuality remains a problem. I myself have been part of this problem - there was a time when I saw someone saying "I am a bisexual man who's never had a homosexual experience" as ridiculous posturing, rather than a legitimate statement of identity.

It's also a problem in scholarship on the ancient world. For instance, I have seen the fact that Achilles and Patroclus are described by Homer as having sex with girls in The Iliad employed as an argument to demonstrate that they could not be themselves lovers. Not the case, of course.

The binary divide is also employed in Eric Shanower's Age of Bronze, where Achilles is depicted as completely losing interest in Deidamia once he meets Patroclus. It's as if a switch has been flicked from "straight" to "gay". And I suspect that some people's problems with the poetess Sappho derive from the fact that she writes love poems to both men and women.

In the end, one has to accept that human sexuality is not that simple.

Monday, June 30, 2014

A special BSFA Lecture will be given at Loncon 3 by Dr Paula James (Open Unversity), and is entitled ‘Pygmalion’s Statue and her Synthetic Sisters: The Perfect Woman on Screen′. The lecture will be given at 20.00 on Saturday August 16th, the ExCel Centre, London Docklands. The lecture is open to any member of Loncon 3.

Paula James is a familiar face and voice to anyone who has studied the Open University’s Arts Foundation courses over the past fifteen years or so, or any of their courses in Classical Studies. Paula is Senior Lecturer in Classical Studies and Staff Tutor in Arts at the OU. She began her academic career after raising her family, and joined the Open University in the 1990s. She is an expert in Latin Literature, particularly the Metamorphoses of Ovid and Apuleius. She also writes on the reception of Latin texts in modern cinema. She has written an excellent introduction to Ancient Rome, Understand Roman Civilization, now in its second edition, and has jointly edited works on the imagery of Trade Union banners and the parrot in literature. Her most recent book is Ovid’s Myth of Pygmalion on Screen: In Pursuit of the Perfect Woman (2013), and it is from this work that her talk to us is derived.The BSFA Lecture is intended as a companion to the George Hay Lecture, which is presented at the Eastercon by the Science Fiction Foundation. Where the Hay Lecture invites scientists, the BSFA Lecture invites academics from the arts and humanities, because we recognise that science fiction fans aren’t only interested in science. The lecturers are given a remit to speak “on a subject that is likely to be of interest to science fiction fans” – i.e. on whatever they want! This is a special lecture for Worldcon, and is the seventh BSFA Lecture.